The exemplary embodiment relates to business processes and their deployment in service-oriented environments.
Business processes (BPs) are often modeled in abstract terms by business users who do not need to be familiar with details of the Information Technology (IT) services that will ultimately be used to implement the processes. The business users use abstract processes which, after modeling, are then translated into implementable processes. This is often performed in the IT department of an organization. Deploying abstract business processes in operating environments with multiple service architectures poses several problems. While the business processes may be identical from a business user's perspective, different IT architectures may use semantically different services for the same capabilities.
Prior solutions to deployment across multiple architectures include mechanisms specific to individual business process management suites (BPMS). For example, the abstract business processes may be defined in a generic business process modeling language and then translated into executable artifacts, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) scripts, which can then be deployed on runtime engines. The same abstract process may be translated into quite different scripts, depending on the service architectures which are available to implement them. A standardized deployment of the business process is thus not feasible in conventional systems where each architecture needs a customized deployment process. Integration with systems from different vendors or open-source packages is also difficult as the generation of the BPEL scripts or runtime is usually done in a proprietary (non-transparent) way. This type of solution is thus not suitable for a large variety of service-oriented architectures.
While generic deployment frameworks that target any software application and deployment mechanisms could, in theory, be used, these approaches are not particularly suitable for business processes where a much finer granularity is needed in controlling the various mappings between business process elements and IT assets.
There remains a need for a system and method for deployment of business processes which facilitates their implementation.